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FastMail has been providing email accounts for 15 years to the world's most demanding users. We've built a reputation for reliability and fast response to our users' needs. And we keep you up to date with new features, and show you how to get most out of FastMail with regular updates on this blog.

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Some exciting changes will be occurring with FastMail.FM. FastMail.FM has been acquired by Opera Software, the developers of the Opera web browser. For more information about Opera, please visit www.opera.com.

This is great news for FastMail.FM users. FastMail.FM will continue to run and grow as the reliable email service you’ve known for over 10 years. We’ll be combining forces with Opera’s technical teams, expertise and products to develop new and innovative products.

Below we’ve put together an FAQ of some questions we thought customers might have.

The FastMail Team

Opera purchase of FastMail FAQ

If you’ve found this page, it’s probably because you didn’t understand everything in the email our lawyers made us send out :)

What do I have to do?

In the email we sent you, there was a link to a web page. Click the link to go to that page, and on that page, click the "I Accept" button. Alternatively, do nothing, and just continue to use your account as you normally do. Both of these actions indicate that you accept that Opera take over the operation of your account and personal data.

There are no configuration changes or any other changes you need to make. Opera will take over the running of FastMail.FM including all existing accounts, so things will just run as they do now with the same billing cycle, pricing, features, reliability, security, etc. Relax, everything is going to continue just fine.

What if I don’t click the "I Accept" button?

If you continue to use your account, we will treat this in the same way as if you had clicked the "I Accept" button.

What if I don’t want Opera to take over my account?

Go to http://www.fastmail.fm, login to your account, then go to the Options -> Cancel Account screen and enter your password to confirm you want to cancel your account.

What is this "personal data" that Opera are taking over?

Your mailbox and your account registration details, which they will treat under the same terms of service and privacy policy as we have been doing. Our terms of service and our privacy policy.

What’s this mean for the future?

This is great news for FastMail.FM users. FastMail.FM will continue to run and grow as the reliable email service you’ve known for over 10 years. Opera have clear plans for the future, and can help provide significantly more resources to build a bigger and better infrastructure and more features.

Why are FastMail selling?

In an increasingly competitive market, we believe we need to make some big investments to take the next steps forward. Joining together Opera’s expertise in web browsers and especially the mobile market, and FastMail.FM’s expertise in email, will allow us to grow and take on the next big challenges in running and building an email service.

The FastMail.FM staff are also excited about this change. We’ve already been working with Opera’s technical teams to exchange expertise, and to develop new and innovative products. Some FastMail.FM staff are already gearing up to move to Norway (Hei!), and vice-versa. Also one of our great long-term part time developers (Neil Jenkins), who helped develop the photo gallery feature, and the new webmail interface (all the HTML, CSS and JS), is going to work for Opera full-time as well, so he’ll be available to work with the email team to build an even better interface!

With Opera’s expertise, and the combined technical talent of our staff, we believe we’ll be able to create a significantly better FastMail for customers in the future.

We’ve made some updates to the Options –> Migrate IMAP feature that are currently on the beta server. Certain edge cases that were causing problems have been fixed up, and there’s now a “No duplicates” option as well. When enabled, as each folder is migrated, the migration code will first check if the folder exists locally, and if so, retrieve a list of Message-Id headers. It will then not download any remote message with the same Message-Id. This can be useful for avoiding large numbers of duplicate emails being downloaded if for some reason a migrate only partially completes, or for some reason you already have some messages downloaded from a remote server.

Please email me (robm@fastmail.fm) with feedback if you’re able to test this feature. Assuming there’s no issues, this will be rolled out to production soon.

We’re trialling a new system on our beta server that allows advanced users to more finely customise their email filtering rules.

The problem with the current approach is that it’s "all" or "nothing". If you start editing the sieve script to make it custom, then you have to keep editing it as a custom script, you can’t have most it generated by the Define rules screen, with just a few custom rules inserted at the points you want.

Also, over time we’ve added certain features that have required inserting rules into your generated script. For instance, when you use Distribution Lists and use the "Archive into folder" option, that works by bcc’ing you on every email to a special address. We insert a rule into your sieve rules to match those emails, and file it into the folder you selected. If you’re using a custom script, then that rule isn’t generated, and thus you might end up with emails in your Inbox that you don’t expect to see.

The way the new system works is that instead of having a "custom script" option, there’s now an "Advanced" tab on the Define Rules screen. On that tab, there’s a single textarea editor. The content of that area is treated specially as "blocks". Each block has a special format, and it allows you to insert the content of the block into various parts of the sieve generation process.

For more information on how this works, we’ve documented the process on the wiki:

We sent out an email today to all FastMail.FM users letting them know that we’ve updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to “comply with legal requirements”. Some people have asked for a summary of what the main changes were.

The company that runs the FastMail.FM email service was restructured, so the responsible company entity names were updated

The disclosure of information was brought up to date with current Australian privacy legislation and spam reporting policies

Some dates and links were corrected

As usual there’s a legal disclaimer with this, if you are particularly concerned about anything, we recommend you read the TOS and privacy policy in full, as this list shouldn’t be considered exhaustive.